Sea robins are weird animals who use leg-like appendages to walk on the seafloor. Now, scientists know why they evolved those limbs.
Forget crab legs. When it comes to taste, the gams on sea robin fishes have crustaceans beat by a mile.
Bellono and his colleagues were able to figure this out through a simple experiment. They took sea robins and placed them in tanks, where they had buried mussels. As a control, they also placed capsules containing nothing but sea water. Sure enough, the fish dug up the mussels, but not the capsules.
“We were originally struck by the legs that are shared by all sea robins and make them different from most other fish,” said David Kingsley, a professor at Stanford who also worked on the studies. “We were surprised to see how much sea robins differ from each other in sensory structures found on the legs.
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